America’s Id and Ego: Football, Baseball, Scandal, and Us

Baseball season is in full swing, but the national conversation is focused, as it now so often is, on football. Baseball is still respectfully called our national pastime, but it has been clear for some years that we are more in tune with the rough-and-tumble tri-weekly bacchanal that is professional football. While baseball reaches the front page in October as teams strive to win the World Series, the NFL is in the news almost constantly. Between abominable behavior off the field (ranging from domestic abuse to murder) and the league’s clumsy handling of said incidents, the concussion scandal, and deflated footballs in the hands of golden boy Tom Brady – the NFL often makes headlines for all the wrong reasons. Long gone are the days when the Draft was a series of deals in smoky back rooms. It’s now a three day televised circus, complete with cameras in the homes of potential draft picks as they receive word of their fate. If the NFL could broadcast games on your contact lenses, it would.

In Hollywood, football or baseball have often served as the backdrop for a larger story – the good or the bad within all of us. There are humorous takes, like Major League or The Replacements, heartwarming children’s movies like Angels in the Outfield, and sapfests like For Love of the Game. Then there are more dramatic efforts. No one can argue against Friday Night Lights (both the film and the TV show) as a heartbreaking, inspiring, honest depiction of the small trials of high school set against the great pain that comes with knowing you’re living a dead end life in a forgotten town. And then there’s The Natural. Based on Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel, The Natural is a movie against which cynicism is no armor. For a baseball fan, can there be anything more beautiful than Roy Hobbs knocking out the lights with his final home run? The story gets the Hollywood treatment with an unambiguously happy ending that doesn’t appear in the book, but that’s what we want from movies – and from sports. The incorruptible Roy Hobbs who just wants to play the game he loves overcomes his past and triumphs over the shadowy forces in the front office. 

“And then when I walked down the street people would’ve looked and they would’ve said, ‘There goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in this game.'” – The Natural

Baseball seems to receive a more respectful treatment in our culture – it got the highest of highbrow honors in 1994 when Ken Burns made a documentary about it featuring interviews with George Plimpton, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and other devotees. One worries if this respect is akin to that experienced by the elderly at the hands of their grandchildren who are really just waiting for them to shuffle off. Though many young baseball fans of my generation are familiar with our current era of corporate professionalism exemplified by the MLB’s retired crowned prince Derek Jeter, it was once a sport of characters. As we dig into the past with documentaries like The Battered Bastards of Baseball and articles like this one (‘Yankee, Executive, Soldier, Spy’) about the utterly fascinating Mike Burke, it becomes clearer that modern baseball lacks goofballs of mythic proportions.

Football, on the other hand, could do with fewer characters. It’s most recent PBS appearance was in a Frontline episode titled “League of Denial” about the concussion scandal. Worry about concussions has recently been so pervasive that even President Obama weighed in: “I would not let my son play pro football,” he told the New Yorker’s David Remnick. The slick corporate professionalism that embodies the media juggernaut that is the modern NFL struggles to cover up some gaping holes.

Sure, baseball has weathered its fair share of recent scandals – Alex Rodriguez’s season-long suspension last year for doping was a reminder that we haven’t wrestled free of that particular bugbear quite yet. Just last week, Jorge Posada gave an interview on CBS This Morning in which he asserted that Rodriguez, and other players who had doped, did not belong in the Hall of Fame. Posada had not shared this feeling with Rodriguez before saying it on the air, perhaps an indication of leftover resentment.

“I don’t think it’s fair. I really don’t. I think the guys that need to be in the Hall of Fame need to be a player that played with no controversy.” – Jorge Posada

Rodriguez, despite all the noise, has returned from his suspension and promptly passed Willie Mays on the all time home run list. The only names ahead of him now are Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Barry Bonds. Whether Barry Bonds’ name will remain on that list is a question the MLB will soon have to determine. The Yankees celebrated this milestone by tweeting a congratulatory message and holding back an allegedly promised $6 million bonus. With his newly hot bat, Rodriguez seems to have won back the fans. “Just the fact that in barely a month’s time, Rodriguez had gone from at least a half-stadium of boos on Opening Day to one united in cheers on May 7 tells you all you need to know about whose side the fans are on in this one,” writes Wallace Matthews for ESPN New York. 

I bring up these scandals not to rake the leagues and players over the coals – enough people with more knowledge of both the scandals and the sports have done that. They interest me because we approach them from a place of moral judgment. Deflategate (has anyone noticed that almost none of these scandals burdened with the “-gate” suffix measure up to Watergate’s awfulness?) is seen not primarily as men doing whatever it takes to win a game, but through the prism of Tom Brady’s morality. Is Brady, supposed paragon of football with his handsomeness and seemingly charmed life, deceitful?

Maddie Meyer. Getty Images. http://abcnews.go.com/Sports/deflate-gate-tom-brady-didnt-alter-ball/story?id=28413065

Millions of us sit in front of the television on Sundays and hope fervently that he and the Patriots will either win or lose, but when he does something that gives him an edge we reach all the way back to our Puritan ancestors and shame him like a deflated Hester Prynne. How dare he? We conveniently ignore the dark side of the ambition and punishing drive it takes to achieve what Brady and all professional athletes have. There are those who are willing to give Brady the benefit of the doubt, like Peter King who covers the NFL for Sports Illustrated. In his recent appearance on Charlie Rose he opined that this scandal would follow Brady for the rest of his life and would certainly be mentioned in his obituary despite being based on nothing more than circumstantial evidence.

 Are we just as complicit in Brady’s alleged cheating as he is? Joe Girardi, the manager of the Yankees, said something instructive: “When you’re productive, you re-earn their respect and they pull for you. That’s the bottom line as players, not just in our sport but in all sports. They want to see their players successful. It really came down to how productive he was going to be, that really determined how he was going to be received.” Girardi was talking about A-Rod, but it applies across the board. We love winners. We tolerate multi-million dollar salaries for winners. Winners are heroes, losers get booed. It takes Gay Talese to make a loser someone you can respect and even then it’s just on the page. But we don’t like seeing winners cross the line.

Americans love a good scandal – especially something inconsequential, like athletes doing stupid things or anyone having sex anywhere at anytime. When it comes to national scandals, America’s rap sheet is long and our memory can be short. Yet, I think these football and baseball misdeeds affect us in a different part of our national psyche. Football and baseball are the two sides of the way we see ourselves. Football is brutal, physical, fast, sneaky, but not without beauty. It’s all about trusting the guys next to you and crushing the guy in front of you. Baseball is lyrical, strategic, unpredictable, sometimes plodding, yet often engrossing. Baseball is the only major team sport in which the majority of the game is really a battle of wills between two men – the pitcher and the batter. Often the fielders are just very focused viewers.

Both sports inspire a deep devotion. In Los Angeles, where I live, the Dodgers are unavoidable. Not only does Clayton Kershaw stare down from billboards, but hardly a day goes by that I don’t see people in Dodgers shirts, hats, jackets, etc. and not all of these people are me looking in the mirror. The next time you go out look at how many bumper stickers, license plate covers, window decals, and flags on passing cars represent either the local NFL or MLB team.

Jun 18, 2014, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports

If football is our Id (impulsive, primitive, instinctual), then baseball is our Ego (reasonable, realistic, controlled). I’m not sure which sport can be our national Superego, maybe tennis. We are at once the nation that produced Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Jimmy Stewart, and Peter Mathiessen as well as John Wayne, Chuck Norris, Norman Mailer, and Andrew Jackson. We are tough and we are smart. We are brash and we are charismatic. We go on flights of fancy and keep our feet firmly rooted to earth. We are large, we contain multitudes. We are both baseball and football and when there is something rotten in either one of them, there is something rotten in us. Or so we seem to worry.

Sports are frequently seen as the great common denominator. Even rudimentary knowledge of any professional league – football, baseball, basketball, even hockey – is one of the easiest ways to make a connection with a stranger. Love for sports crosses all boundaries – except that one between people who hate sports and the rest of us. It’s instructive that it’s baseball (or football) that is our national pastime and not, say, some artistic pursuit. We can all watch these superlative athletes, people who have really achieved the peak of physical perfection, perform at the highest levels week in and week out and pretend that we have any idea what that feels like. We’ve all thrown a ball around and some of us have even played in high school or college and in a small part of our minds we’re there on that field. 

This role of national common denominator, and the inherent drama of winning or losing, is what makes football and baseball so attractive to screenwriters. What simpler way to tell us about ourselves then through something we are all familiar with? Friday Night Lights and The Natural are so affecting because we understand the stakes and we believe that our heroes are good and their opponents (certainly in The Natural) are evil. When our national pastime(s) don’t reflect back to us what we idealize about each game, it cuts deeper than we imagine. There are more important stories to be told and more vexing moral questions to worry about than whether a professional athlete cheated, but if what we see on the field is how we see ourselves then it strikes us at our core. The world isn’t a level playing field and in life we frequently find ourselves in a rigged game and so we fervently hope that at least this one thing we all love can be pure. Even when we know, for a thousand reasons, that it’s not. 

-Nina